Bill Clinton as Lech, Coward -- and Soviet Agent / Farce takes a fictional swipe at the president

REVIEWED BY Dan Froomkin, Special to The Chronicle

Published
4:00 am PDT, Sunday, August 23, 1998

LUCKY BASTARD

By
Charles McCarry Random House
; 385 pages; $24.95
With the news from Washington reading like a deliciously trashy sex farce, it's not so surprising to find an accomplished political thriller writer trying to turn the headlines into beach reading. But
Charles McCarry
's undisguised novelistic smear of President Clinton, "Lucky Bastard," is about as appealing as a
Vanity Fair
photo essay of
Linda Tripp
. And about as subtle as
Ken Starr
.

The Bill Clinton character isn't just a spineless politician with an unquenchable sexual appetite -- he's an agent of the Soviet Union! And a rapist!

The Hillary character isn't just a schemer -- she's a colonel in the KGB! And a murderer!

The Madison Savings and Loan stand-in doesn't just fail -- it fails after laundering $27 million in drug cartel money into the presidential campaign!

In an intentionally over-the-top farce, such heavy-handed plotting might not be fatal. But McCarry takes this book verrry seriously. In his author's note, he modestly describes elements of the book as "prophecy."

Clever writing might have helped. But the narrator of this tome is a dour KGB major named Dmitri -- Dmitri! -- who writes about as thrillingly as, well, a dour KGB major. As a narrator, Dmitri is such a disastrous device that McCarry is reduced to providing a footnote -- in a beach novel! -- on Dmitri's "methodology." ("An intelligence report, the literary form with which I am most familiar, is seldom an eyewitness account, but rather a synthesis of one or many such accounts . . ." Drone, drone, drone.)

The title of the book is supposed to be amusing. The Clinton character, named John Fitzgerald "Jack" Adams, believes he is actually the love child of JFK. It's another plot device that goes nowhere. Jack, even as he rises to the presidency, never meets his would-be cousins, which might have made for some laughs.

Similarly, you can't help but look forward to what Jack will do in the White House -- how he'll treat the interns, for instance. But the vast majority of the book is taken up with the monotonous and utterly ludicrous back story about how the KGB traps Jack and makes him marry his handler, and how his vaguely defined roguish charm helps him rise to power. The tale is dotted with elements taken directly from Clinton's biography -- draft-dodging, a trip to the Soviet Union, sneaking around with state troopers -- but rather than adding verisimilitude, these details just add to the sense of a profound deficit of imagination.

The tiresome descriptions of Jack's nature are, I suspect, the main reason for this book. Over and over, McCarry describes Jack/Bill as a compulsive liar, a seducer, incapable of loving anything (including his country), motivated purely by lust and ambition. "Since childhood," one character intones, "he has studied people, found out what they wanted, and made them believe he was giving it to them even when he wasn't . . . Everybody knows that he lies all the time and about everything, but nobody seems to mind."

As Jack's wife, the first lady/KGB colonel, puts it: "The only place Jack can operate with impunity is in the best hideout in America -- the White House." You can find more probing analysis any afternoon on talk radio.

Maybe in "Lucky Bastard" McCarry is trying to be funny. But the only laugh in the book comes near the end, when the Susan McDougal character tries to assassinate the Bill Clinton character with a poisoned suppository.

McCarry, who has co-authored two books with Alexander Haig, is clearly no friend to Democrats. His last novel -- "Shelley's Heart," a gripper -- shared some of the themes of "Lucky Bastard." But clever plotting, intriguing characters and a good eye for Washington detail made "Shelley's Heart" effective. There, McCarry's rancor was a device. In "Lucky Bastard," rancor is all there is.